There are a number of situations where there is a significant need to be able to track the movement of multiple objects as those objects travel toward or away from a preset point. These situations can include sporting events such as car racing, horse racing, and track & field events. Additionally, there are other non-sporting situations where the same need exists. A primary example is in the field of police enforcement of vehicle speeds on roadways where specific speed limits are in force.
While there are number of devices that are generally capable of tracking and determining the speed of an individual vehicle traveling on such roads, there is a substantial problem in detecting and determining the speed of multiple vehicles traveling on multi-lane roadways. For example, the most common form of speed detection devices used by law enforcement include laser based and radar based devices. Although these are presently the predominantly used devices, the correlation between the speed shown on those speed detection devices with the actual vehicle that is speeding can be very problematic.
For example, if a law enforcement officer establishes a point near a roadway to monitor the speed of the vehicles traveling on the roadway, the officer must first detect a speeding vehicle and then determine which vehicle was speeding. The present state of the radar and laser based detection devices do not provide that type of automatic and technical discrimination ability. In most cases, it is the law enforcement officer's responsibility to correlate speeding detection signaled by the speed monitoring device with what the officer observes at the moment the speed detection device indicates a speeding vehicle. If the monitored roadway is only a two lane road, the volume of traffic is usually small enough that the speeding vehicle can be readily determined by the officer's observations. However, if the monitored roadway has more than one lane for each direction of traffic, the officer faces a much more difficult time in deciding which or perhaps two or more vehicle are the speeding vehicle.
This problem reaches its highest levels when the roadway being monitored is an Interstate super highway where as many as five or six lanes of traffic are moving in the same direction. This problem is further exacerbated when each of the five or six lanes contains a large number of vehicles. In those types of situations, if the currently used radar based or laser based speed detection device signals the law enforcement officer that a speeding vehicle has been detected, the multitude of vehicles traveling and a large number of lanes makes it extremely difficult for the law enforcement officer to make an accurate and positive determination of which of the vehicles is speeding. Additionally, there may in fact be more than one vehicle speeding and the officer may be forced to select just one vehicle that appears to be speeding and cite that single vehicle for exceeding the local speed limit.
While law enforcement officers have done well in observing and detecting which vehicle is speeding when the speed detection device signals a speeding vehicle, sometimes the criteria used by the law enforcement officer may allow some speeding violators to evade the law enforcement officer's detection. For example, in multi-vehicle, multilane situations where the observed differences in the speeds of the vehicles cannot be quickly observed, the officer may sometimes suspect that the vehicle in the left lane, the so-called “fast lane” of an Interstate roadway, is the speeding vehicle. Individuals who are known to speed often have used this bias against the law enforcement officer by speeding on a multi-lane highway using on the far right lane, the so-called “slow lane” of an Interstate roadway, to essentially hide their violations from the law enforcement officers.
Therefore, there is a need for a system by which a law enforcement officer can monitor relatively higher volumes of traffic moving on multiple lane roadways and still be able to accurately determine the traveling speed of each moving vehicle and then specifically identify the ownership of the vehicle that has been traveling at a rate that exceed the maximum rate allowed for the monitored roadway.